"Let it be one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics." Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1840.
A Brit-in-Helsinki's blog about global politics, climbing, cycling, things that annoy me and other bits of life. But not necessarily in that order.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

"Camp Bucca prison has become a school for takfir supporters"

MEMRI, the Israeli translation organization, has an interesting and depressing translation of an al-Arabiya television report on Jihadi violence inside U.S. prisons in Iraq, notably Camp Bucca, against other Iraqi prisoners. It shows the depths of extremism that the Iraqi Jihadis have reached. The al Qaeda and other jihadis are called "Takfiris" by other prisoners. Takfir is the act of one Muslim pronouncing another to be an apostate, or 'bad' Muslim, and extremists often use it as a way of legitimating calls to kill the supposed apostate. Non-Takfiri prisoners recount people being beaten for smoking, stepping into the toilets with the wrong foot first, or just for sitting in the wrong place. It also suggests that the U.S. forces do little to control what is happening inside the prisons, just letting the prisoners get on with "organising" themselves. The report suggest some innocent prisoners who get mistakenly picked up by US or Iraqi forces, end up joining al Qaeda to find protection within the prison.

Extremist recruiting in prisons is a well known phenomenon worldwide; the reasons that it happens being rather obvious. But it has been well known for many years now that many held in these internments camps in Iraq are not part of the insurgency, and it therefore makes allowing the prisons to get this far out of control into a very self-defeating policy.

The picture at the top I found on photo essay on a U.S. Department of Defense website, showing a military policeman seizing an improvised knife during a search at Camp Bucca. The pictures are from a couple of years back, but show some of the weapons that were being found even back then.